Page 92 of Hot Greek Summer

Frankie stared at him, incredulous. ‘You do?’

He refilled their glasses. They were both drinking their champagne too quickly, to help oil the wheels of the most intimate conversation they’d had in seventeen years.

‘I never stopped thinking you were the prettiest girl in town,’ he said, placing his glass down and standing up. ‘I just stopped telling you.’ Tentatively, he put his hand on her waist and drew her nearer. ‘That’s why I came here, Frank. To tell you now, and hope it’s not too late.’

Back in school, Gav had been the handsome rogue, the cheeky, happy-go-lucky guy whom all the girls fancied and who only had eyes for her. Frankie saw that guy again now; those same sparkling eyes, that same reassuring height, and oh God, that same sudden spiral of excitement unfurling in the pit of her stomach when he paid her a compliment.

‘This, Gav. This is what’s been missing. I thought it had gone for good, but now …’ she trailed off, not even understanding what was happening here herself. And then he dipped his head and kissed her, slowly at first and then not slowly at all, tentatively and then passionately and undone. Frankie cried a little, because feelings she thought had disappeared had only been hiding all along, and Gav felt as if the broken pieces of his heart were magnetically pulling themselves back into one complete whole. He led his ex-wife through to his room and laid her on his bed, then closed the door and pulled his T-shirt over his head.

A while later, he wandered into the kitchen to retrieve what was left of the champagne, because, at long last, Frankie and Gav had something precious to celebrate.

Stella flicked through a copy ofOK!half-heartedly, looking at the pictures of celebs and their beautiful lives, until she reached the latest star-studded wedding centrespread and unceremoniously dumped the mag in the bin beside her unforgiving metal airport seat.

The huge ticking clock on the wall informed her that she had one more hour to go of her own beautiful sunshine life, and then it was back to England, where the current forecast was grey skies and an unseasonably cold easterly wind.

Whatever. Stella’s only plan was to check into the nearest Premier Inn, drink a bottle of wine, and then crawl into bed for a day or two before she set about the grotty business of reality again. She should never have come to Skelidos in the first place. She wasn’t a whim and exotic adventures kind of woman. She was a go-getter and a ball-breaker, and she intended to live up to her name when she walked into her new job on Monday.God. Monday. Her heart wasn’t just in her boots, it was beneath the soles of them, squashed into the tread like old mud and stones. God, she was furious. Furious with herself for being so stupid as to believe in fairytale lives, and even more furious with Angelo for being the real reason she was leaving the island.

‘Stella!’

Yeah, there he was again. She wasn’t even surprised that every man sounded like him. She heard his voice all of the time in her head, and even though she kept telling him to piss off he seemed insistent on hanging around.

‘Stella!’

Right, so that was getting annoying. Piss off, Angelo. You’re Greek, I’m English, and I’m leaving you here in this bloody airport when I get on that plane and I’m never going to even say your name again. She drummed her polished nails on the metal armrests as her eyes scanned the boards to see if her gate had come up yet.

‘Stella.’

So this was a first. Her ears and her mind had been playing tricks on her for weeks, but up until now she’d been able to rely on her eyes at least to tell her the truth. They seemed to be failing her now though, because they were showing her Angelo Vitalis, and he was on his knees in front of her looking out of breath and relieved and terrified and all kinds of gorgeous. She blinked a few times. Be gone, demon man, be gone.

He didn’t go anywhere. He stared at her, real as you like in his pale-blue shirt and tie, and then he put his hands on her knees, warm and heavy, and she realised that her eyes hadn’t conjured him up from thin air and dogged longing, he was actually there, flesh, blood and beating heart.

‘What the bloody hell do you want?’

She went from shell-shocked to furious in a flash. She’d been less than an hour away from escaping this godforsaken place, this place where every raven-haired man made her heart fleetingly hurt and every broad, suntanned shoulder made her remember being unceremoniously thrown over one and taken to bed. And now he was here. He was here, and she wasn’t having it.

‘I’ve come for you,’ he said, never taking his eyes from hers. Didn’t he realise he sounded like the grim reaper?

She coughed, spluttered in fact. ‘You’ve come for me? Bollocks you have. Why? I didn’t ask you to come and I don’t want you here, so piss off.’

‘I’ve come to take you home.’

‘I don’t need an escort. I’m a big girl.’

‘Your home isn’t England. Your home is with me.’

Christ! Stella felt her knicker elastic almost literally twang. It was absolutely ridiculous and outrageous, but all the same, he was here and he was saying things he had no right to say and her traitorous body was reacting in a way that proved it hadn’t learnt a single lesson when it came to him.

‘All of those things you read about me were true,’ he said. ‘I was a stupid, lonely man looking for company in all the wrong places, including at the bottom of champagne bottles and at stupid parties with people I didn’t even like.’

Stella looked at his big, bronze hands clamped over her knees and felt her determination falter, because he could have been describing her own life before she came to the island.

‘And if the truth is all I have left to give you, then here it is.’ He pulled his mobile from the breast pocket of his shirt. Clicking through it, he found what he was searching for and turned it towards her to show her the grainy image on the screen. It took Stella a minute to understand what she was looking at, and then she felt her blood slowly start to boil in her veins.

‘Why do you have that?’

Angelo shook his head. ‘I’m not proud of myself, Stella.’

The image wasn’t salacious, or sexy. It was far worse than that in Stella’s eyes. It was a recipe carved into an old wooden bench. The secret recipe for Skelidos gin, carved into the bench in the cellar at Villa Valentina.

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